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Talk:Updates/@comment-84.249.253.116-20121026150645/@comment-755472-20121105044948
it's ok to post this here I guess. It's a little "snarky" but it's not nasty. For the record though.. there's two different perspectives to this, and since the company can't tell you theirs directly, I can try to explain a little bit, in terms of what "clues" there are that are publically available. They do listen to players. Many suggestions that players come up with have to do with making improvements in a standalone, already paid for, game. That's not what these games are. They're required to earn income through player support. In a standalone game, the work is done upfront, and recovered through the sales of the game. In this kind of game, they do the work upfront, and then continue doing work, and commit resources to it, in the hope that a certain percentage of the players will decide to pay for it. If that's not happening, and the percentage isn't large enough, you end up with a whole lot of people placing loads onto your resources, which soaks up what little income there is. It's interesting that the developers are percieved as beening "greedy." They've made a game that's free to play, and would just like folks to pay for extras so that it supports the cost of the game, and then MAYBE, POSSIBLY make some kinda profit off of it... you know, to make the effort worthwhile, and worth continuing. I figure that an Xbox game costs $60 and you never have to pay another fee for it, ever, and it basically just sort of floats until everyone's tired of it, or the next game comes along, or whatever. By comparison, this game continued on-and-on with new issues appearing, and the interest levels went up and down, while they scrambled to make it a game worth coming back to, day after day. In theory, this game becomes superior to an xbox game when it maintains interest for a longer period than the Xbox game did. So by comparison, folks pay $60 for one or two months of gametime, or pay whatever amount they want to pay, for an ongoing period. If they were all willing to pay like even $30-$40 a month or something, this game would have been truly amazing. However, instead, we have folks relentlessly begging for free Beta Keys, and causing disruptions when they decide that $5 is "WAY TOO MUCH" for access to additional content/weapons/etc of the game. A lot of folks publically pride themselves on never paying a cent on facebook game, which of course, defeats the purpose of the game developers that bring content like this to Facebook. There's reasons why no other game like this appears on facebook. A lot of people leaving the game, in search of a replacement, find that anything worth pursuing, also costs money after you get hooked on it. Bottom line is.. games cost money. The low percentage of folks that decide to put more than $5 into it, isn't enough to cover the many thousands of folks who decide they'll never pay one red cent. Yes, I too beleived that if the economics of the game were different, and some things cheaper, there might have been more sales to support the game. However, it doesn't affect the percentage of buyers as strongly as you might imagine. It would mean that those that were buying, would pay less for what they wanted, rather than enough more buyers to cover the discrepancy. If you were here long enough, you might remember how the store prices plummetted a couple of times. To someone who understands these things it meant that they were trying to find that balance to increase the percentage of buyers-to-players. When you stand back and look at it, from the outside, knowing the industry, you can see several bits of evidence pointing towards that type of thing. They tried a lot of stuff, and we are experiencing the results of that.. it simply wasn't enough..